Principal investigator: John Mauro

University: Pennsylvania State University

Industry partner: Remark Glass

Over 12 million tons of glass is produced annually in the United States yet only 25% of this glass is recycled. In traditional glass recycling processes, post-consumer waste glass is sorted by color; non-soda lime glass compositions (e.g., Pyrex, Gorilla Glass) cannot be recycled at all. In this project, Remark Glass will partner with Dr. John Mauro’s Glass Research group at Pennsylvania State University to address several technical challenges facing glass recycling. Founded in 2016, Remark Glass is a female-owned manufacturing company focused on innovative and creative glass recycling and has the distinction of being Philadelphia’s first zero-waste certified company.

This project will fund one graduate student to work closely with Dr. Mauro and Remark Glass to thoroughly characterize different colors/compositions of glass cullet and develop predictive models to allow for mixing of cullet and use of alternative compositions. Characterizations include viscosity curves (for press molding), optical color coordinates (to predict and fine-tune glass color), thermal expansion coefficient (for thermal shock resistance), and liquidus temperature (for quality control). Predictive models will be developed and delivered to Remark Glass to enable the use of mixed-color and mixed-composition cullet and tailor-design glass products and processes using recycled glass.